art basel

Jaden Smith, Performance Artist, Played a Show at Art Basel Miami Beach

“Totally,” said Jaden Smith on Saturday afternoon at a mansion on a private island in Biscayne Bay. The 17-year-old actor-musician was standing atop a white leather bench at a party during Art Basel Miami Beach hosted by Galore and Complex magazines. The crowd of mostly 20-somethings seemed somewhat uninterested, a fact that hadn’t escaped Smith or Harry Hudson, the singer and social media star he shared the bill with.

“Talk to me, bro,” said Hudson about halfway through their brief performance.

“Yo, talk to me” said Jaden.

“There’s people here, a lot of them are not paying attention, you know what I’m saying?” said Hudson.

“Totally,” said Smith.

“I think we just gotta get in their face more,” he said. “But that’s how it is. You know when you come to a party like this that that’s how it is.”

With that, the pair’s DJ cued another track and Smith got back to his performance, running around the room and rattling through his lyrics—equal parts precocious teenage observation and fortune cookie profundity. Over the past few years, Smith’s offbeat vibe has made his Twitter account one of the more oddly compelling corners of the Internet to a lot of people much older than he is. He’s the secretly smart stoner in the new class of brat pack that has, in the post-Kardashian world, turned very existence into mega-fame. (Smith’s pal Kylie Jenner was also at the party, Hailey Baldwin in tow, but seemed to have retired upstairs before the performance.)

At its best, Smith’s social media presence has a kind of found art appeal. Or maybe it’s outsider comedy. The allure is in trying to figure it out how much he’s in on it, which is to say booking him to play in town during Art Basel Miami Beach was a little piece of genius. (On Friday night, when a woman was stabbed with an X-Acto knife at the main fair, The Miami Herald reported that attendees were unsure at first if it was a performance.) And why watching him struggle to get the attention of a room full of young, beautiful, and painfully cool kids was so strange. Not that it seemed to frustrate him too much.

“This is our last song,” Smith said introducing their finale. “I promise.” A few minutes later Jaden Smith walked off the impromptu stage as his P.A. system played Will Smith’s 1997 hit “Welcome to Miami.”